Dengbêjs storytellers in "Love in the Face of Genocide" by Rojava Film Commune
This is the second part of my review of “Machinations” at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid this summer. I renew my attempts to encompass this huge summer show which is more like a biennale than a themed exhibition. In this segment we move from “War Machines” through “Schizo culture” to “Cinema Machines of Care”. The old hospital-turned-museum fulfills its new task of lancing traumas and salving subjectivities.
Among the “War Machines”
Resuming my roam through “Machinations” , the Indonesian collective Taring Padi has a setup in the first room, a large-scale banner print behind an assembly of brightly painted cardboard cutout figures of evil corruptos. As part of the show, the Reina’s Museo Situado project organized a workshop with Taring Padi in the community garden "Esta es una plaza". Participants made similar
wayang kardus, puppets in Indonesian style to express issues of the neighborhood.
Taring Padi is the best known of the art collectives that emerged after the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998. A mural they made in 2002 was part of their retrospective at last year's Documenta, curated by another Indonesian collective, ruangrupa. The enormous work, like Cian Dayrit’s work, was an attempt to come to terms in cartoonish vernacular with the continuities of colonialism and the inheritor elites who continued the exploitation, in a kind of pulp fiction muralismo.
The work was the trigger for a nasty scandal. An anti-Semitic caricature, pointing to the material support the Israeli government provided to the Suharto dictatorship, led to a prolonged media attack on the public-funded exhibition as rightwing media seized upon the issue.
at right: Mish Mish Effendi
This is a specifically German version of rightwing culture wars, a cynical exploitation of minority sensibilities. These representations of post-colonial Indonesia’s hard history, which Taring Padi included in their Documenta retrospective, were not made for European audiences. Jews are a minuscule part of the Indonesian population, while the actions of Israel in support of dictatorships, mobilized through Mossad, have earned that state great international enmity. Subsequent to the scandal, both art collectives have been working to repair their relationship with German Jewish groups.
Not So Comical
Jews are the original ancient European nomads. The installation of Eran Schaerf, an Israeli architect, urbanist, and photographer,
Nomadesque (2023) is a full set of displays built around the Frenkel brothers, cartoonists in Egypt in the 1930s. The Frenkels created the Mish Mish Effendi character in animated cartoons, which Schaerf reads as an avatar of Jewish exile. Through a wraparound set, a tiny movie theater, and artifacts, Mish Mish cartoons assert a cheeful cosmopolitan identity through borrowing attributes from other pop culture icons like Mickey Mouse. Perhaps this lightheartedness was only possible in the prewar era before postcolonial boundaries in the ex-Middle East had hardened.
Nomadology: Lifeways and Military Motions
In
Exquisite Corpse, the Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet digs deep into an antique intellectual job site. His great grandfather was a translator for a German ethnographer who produced a four volume work (displayed) on the Bedouins of the Transjordan region. That zone is now a few different countries. The point of this, the key artifact in Tabat's installation, is that the means of roaming used by these nomadic people – a tent form called
bisht – was adapted by imperial militaries. Most of the room is hung with the looming drab canvas of different military tents; related hardware, pegs etc., are hung along the walls. These ethnographers then were in a way spies, and agents of colonial governance. Knowledge is appropriation.
The Rojava Film Commune, working in active war zones, is among the artists whose work concerns ongoing processes of ethnic dislocation. In the video
Love in the Face of Genocide (Shero Hinde, dir., 2020) traditional Kurdish singers recite their new and old verses of loss.
Slipping along we leave the realm of analysis and enter a terrain of affect unleashed where the museum becomes an annex of the asylum.
These are the artworks posited as examples of “Schizo Machines”. There is politics behind this too, as was elaborated early on in Deleuze and Guattari’s book
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 FR/1983 ENG). The idea that conditions confront us with impossible choices which lead to a nomral kind of madness is adumbrated in the work of Gregory Bateson on the double bind, and R.D. Laing’s idea of knots – the bundles of contradictions that both motivate and paralyze moderns.
Above right: Huanchaco blesses you
Cuidado: Here Be Madness
Tai Shani's
Neon Hieroglyph video takes as its subject a direct organic cause of derangement: ergot, the hallucinogenic fungus growing on rye which caused medieval epidemics of madness. Based in microphotography, the shifting swirling colors of Shani’s “feminist psychedelia” spin a bleary erotic narrative of alienism, endlessly replicating rhizomatically (another of Deleuze and Guattari's favorite metaphors).
A vitrine and wall works concern the personal territory elaborated by the Zush/Evru (aka Albert Porta)
who imagined a personal “Evrugo Mental State”, a country which manufactures ironic weaponry that kills with pleasure and hilarity. Artifacts from that construct – a flag, currency, passport, map – occupy a vitrine.
A wall is given over to Huanchaco (Fernando Gutiérrez), a kind of obsessive Peruvian music-priest, whose universalist
Manual para Hablar con Dios (2018) is elaborated in meticulous blue ink drawings of the machines he proposes. In a video he does costumed performances with lots of smoke and mirrors.
Queer Plastic and Fish
Probably the oddest of the odd videos here are two rooms given to the queer Indian artist Tejal Shah.
Between the Waves (2012) is a kind of choreographed bacchanal of unconventional semi-nude young bodies, floundering about in ways that seem profoundly uncomfortable. The dancers(?) are costumed with bindings and protruberances and move through an underwater-scape of colored plastic sea vegetables. A confused fish wanders into the frame. Braided e-waste floats over a bleached coral reef.
In another scene set on a high balcony terrace with a scenic urban overlook, the queer bacchantes clamber over and penetrate one another. Pomegranates are burst, and the seeds massaged into orifices. Ouch. A couple of light sculptures in the room seem like gilding the lily beside this exceptionally weird set of filmic setups.
Another room shows the video of Tejal Shah’s stagings of performances in landscapes of industrial waste, mountains of it, overlooking deep vistas of urban development. These include hill-sized walls of the dumb brown shredded unrecyclables Western countries export to Asia. A black-and-white animation on a screen alongside abstracts the theme, rapidly proposing hieroglyphics. You give us garbage we give you back spectacle.
Healing in the Movie Theater
From here the rooms branch like labyrinths, as we enter the segment “Cinema Machines of Care”. Guattari worked with La Borde, Jean Oury’s psychiatric clinic. Their innovative protocols – in brief, the inmates ran the asylum
together with the doctors – shared a lot with the clinic regimens of Francesc Tosquelles Llauradó, whose work was the subject of an earlier exhibition at the Reina Sofia packed with classic “outsider art” called "Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field". (It's a Surrealist poetic conjunction; Tosquelles invited Surealist artists and poets to his asylum.)
Oury and Guattari
That exhibition revealed the broad scale project of the Catalan psychiatrist, who came from frontline mental clinics in the Spanish Civil War. His goal was to reform the asylum and reintegrate mental patients as a cooperative cultural society and creative production unit.
Another Reina Sofia favorite, Dora Garcia has some rooms here, the talking heads video “Deviant Majority from Basaglia to Brazil” (2010; 34 min.), and a darkened tunnel with an impassive smiling young face and a couple of gesticulating forearms. A blackboard proposes the excercises I was far too exhausted to consider. Later I saw a boy waving his hands, trying to interact with the smiling face video. Sorry, no dice.
My Spinning Head!
At this point my partner arrives. She has watched parts of the video featuring Guattari and Tosquelles, among others. She describes an installation I have just seen in terms completely unlike what I saw.
A show as dense and lengthy as this is a tesseract. The videos all together would take many hours to watch, and most visitors will only enter each viewing room rather briefly. What any one person gleans from it is going to be completely different from what any other person sees.
Among the Many Dead
It took me a few times to get it, but Gee Vaucher’s
Lost (2018) is a synthetic anti-war message. It's delivered through the scale of the images – four enormous portraits of abused children, four paintings, four heads. Then a fat 6” thick book hand written, page upon page of apparent markings, scratchings in ordered rows. The first pages are stick figures; the figures diminish in size on each successive page, becoming in the end just innumerable tiny marks in blocks.
Gee Vaucher is renowned as the illustrator for the anarcho-punk band Crass, and her theme throughout her life has been anti-war. This is that – a kind of metaphorical accounting of the uncountable, the incomprehensible damage done to the legions of victims, especially children, by the endless ongoing calamities of warring adults. The work plays out in this abrupt change of scale – “4 things at a time” – then a diminuendo, on and on and on, which we can only “read” about.
Eternal Return… 65+ Get in Free
The density of information presented, the multiple unfamiliar contexts made it near impossible for me to make it through the entire show from beginning to end. I saw that the only way to cover it, to get to the later pieces, was to re-enter the exhibition from the rear. As it turned out, there are two other separate museum rooms with yet more works.
Recollecting Radio Alice
The Sala del Protocolo, a chamber in the museum with a dramatic spiral staircase and extensive cabinetry holds Loreto Martinez Troncoso’s installation
Poemarios garabato (scrawl poems; 2023). Troncoso covers the walls with scratchy texts and markings. An eclectic selection of sounds issues from a floor-crawling array of speakers. The artist works with collaborators, and gathers multiple voices and readings, including Franco "Bifo" Berardi, a principal in the free Radio Alice project in Bologna in 1977.
Radio Alice was an important pirate radio station during the Autonomia organizing in Bologna. It was a continuous source of in-the-moment advice to street fighters (phone booth calls to the station), in between playing music and cracking jokes. Félix and Bifo were close. Guattari wrote a script for a film about Radio Alice, set amidst the 1977 Autonomist uprisings. Berardi wrote a biography of his long-time friend and collaborator.
Big Head Economists
So, coming in at the back door of the main exhibition, I encounter the videos of Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, grouped under the title
Undesireable Aliens (2021). These works feature big-head puppets –
cabezudos, a popular festival tradition in Spain – delivering and listening to economic discourses. Among them is Milton Friedman, the influential anti-Keynesian monetarist economist who advised Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The misleading simplifications and condescension of Friedman’s discourse, especially his attempts at humor, come across sharply when he is caricatured in this way.
Misery Is Profitable
Around the corner, Femke Herregraven’s work
Spectres of Calculated Prophecies (2023) visibilizes the catastrophe bond market. This is an especially bleak infographic, a lightbox with a soft colorfield look to it. If you have the feeling that major disasters have been accelerating in the last several years you are correct. Moreover, speculating on them constitutes a rich market for investors.
I reference Herregraven’s explanation of her work in the links below. Looking through that chart, with its chronology of hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of deaths did not incline me to understand how capital markets make money off of this.
Another of her works, drawings called
Split Ends, show clumps and loops of hair with micrographic captions of a fatalistic nature alongside them.
A regular feature of Reina Sofia exhibitions are the products of critical cartography groups, nearly all of them downloadable with QR codes. In an earlier room, Hackitectura.net analyzes migration in a graphic data visualization, and the Iconoclasistas present the map of autonomous sites in the museum's neighborhood of Lavapies as it was annotated by visitors in a group exhibition three years ago.
Painting with Props in a Theater
Some relief from the panoply of works with thick content and context is Heiner Goebbels’
The Last Painting (20 min.; 2023). A record of a 2019 NYC performance in the vast Park Avenue Armory space, a team of ‘actors’ move large cloths around. Really large. It is a theater of objects, an abstract exercise, relaxing, mesmerizing even, in its flow with honking foghorn saxophone accompaniment. My partner sees one man working harder than the others….
Ismaïl Bahri’s
Foyer (2016) is another abstract exercise. So easy to pass by, it consists of an apparently blank screen with subtitles in Spanish of Arabic speech. A group of men joking. Splashing is heard. Bahri is filming a sheet of paper. Conversations gather around him. “What are you doing?” Discussions about skin color.
The video resulted from Bahri’s purely abstract experiments filming a sheet of white paper placed up againist the camera lens. He did this in the street in Tunis, and soon curious passersby started to talk about the artist’s work and about other things, which changed Bahri’s experiment. “I stopped watching in order to start listening.” What began as "an abstract operation" about "blindness" ended up to be a film about Tunis.
To Murder Poets
Another of those separate rooms is made into a theater for the work of the Italian filmmaking couple
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, presented under the title
Frente a Guernica (100 min.; 2023). They work with found footage, in this case Spanish – there is footage of the Civil War, advancing troops, wounded carried from the field, Republican refugees… sad images of a sad time.
One of their segments covers the Mandelstam affair, part of which played out in Spain, a consequence of the country’s alliance with Stalin’s Russia. During a conference in Republican Barcelona, Russian writers debated the matter of the poet Osip Mandelstam’s insults to Stalin. The poet died some years later in a labor camp: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed,” he wrote. “Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
Subsequently, many countries may be added to the list.
The Hospital Become a Museum
There are significant exhibitions within the “Cinema of Care” segment of “Machinations” that deal with African subjects. One of the largest is Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s room. The work of the Cameroonian theorist of a “healing cinema” is presented in a classroom-like setup, quite cold in the summer, with large monitors on two sides showing black faces watching the screen.
I came back with a jacket.
Several films were shown. In one, contemporary speakers discuss the discourse of colonialism, how the national anthem includes deprecatory words about the country’s people. Historical footage shows Cameroonian dignitaries negotiating the decolonization. A visit to the country by De Gaulle. What would be the continued relation between the two countries? The African diplomats are stepping lightly, speaking circumspectly durinig their visit to Paris.
In one scene, Leopold Senghor speaks of the extreme difficulties of uniting African countries which speak French, English and Arabic. A contemporary head intervenes – “The French project of De Gaulle was a petroleum project!”
Bekolo’s cinema heals by reflection and reference. It is about “how the story should be told, how the story should have been told.”
Human Zoos and Filmic Paradise
One Afro-German artist filmed in her studio by Bekolo’s crew speaks about her work with the history of Cameroonians who were taken to Germany. (I missed the name; maybe it’s Amma Asante?) She begins discussing girl children kidnapped at the turn of the last century by German missionaries, trained in Germany, then “exported” back to Cameroon. There they endured extreme isolation; were told that they were white people. Many died of depression.
She spoke of Afro-Germans who were prisoners in a film set paradise, a twisting tale that begins with Carl Hagenbeck of Hamburg, a purveyor of wild animals, and “an ethnography showman and a pioneer in displaying humans next to animals in human zoos” (WikiPedia). In Berlin, Templehof, site of the UFA film studios, housed Cameroonian actors who played in serial films. Elaborate sets were built for these. Later Templehof became a wartime training ground for Nazi concentration camp admininstrators. More recently it was the site of a camp for migrants.
An adjacent gallery housed an extensive presentation of documents from the Cultural Association of African Workers in France. The centerpiece of this was a filmed play,
Traana, Temporary Migrant (26 min.; 2017), by Raphaël Grisey and Kàddu Yaraax.
The 1977 play treats the exodus of rural people to the city, and to Europe. The background of this work, explicated in the display, goes back to the failed '60s and '70s liberation movements in Senegal and Mali. The peopie with whom the Paris-based activists reconnected, seeking to help them form cooperatives, soon became experts in migration.These are the fishermen who navigate pirogues full of migrants to Spain.
The weight of multiple oppressions is twisted in knots bound up with fictional and religious fantasies. The moment we think we understand is the moment opportunist politicians can fool us. Reconciling to the trauma and recognizing the responsibility of an oppressor nation is a lifelong work.
This museum used to be a hospital. Now they are trying to mend the cares and worries of the world in another way.
LINKS
LINKS
Taring Padi
https://www.taringpadi.com/
on Taring Padi at Documenta – Dorian Batycka, “‘All the Red Lines Have Been Crossed’: Just Days After Opening, Documenta Conceals an Artwork Depicting Antisemitic Stereotypes”, June 21, 2022
succinct resume of the Taring Padi crisis last year; the after-effects continue to reverberate
Jews in Indonesia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Indonesia
"Rojava Film Commune lanza un nuevo documental sobre la tradición de dengbej en Sinjar" includes clips of the video
https://anfespanol.com/cultura/rojava-film-commune-lanza-un-nuevo-documental-sobre-la-tradicion-de-dengbej-en-sinjar-20762
In Conversation: Tai Shani on "Untitled Hieroglyphs"... speaking on centuries of "tripping" in Italy, ergot outbreaks and witchcraft, and more.
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/in-conversation-tai-shani-untitled-hieroglyphs/
A 2014 MACBA project on free radio begins with a 1/2 hour podcast on the Radio Alice project, "RADIOACTIVITY #1 Radio Alice" is at:
https://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials/radioactivity-1-radio-alice
See Félix Guattari, Isabelle Mangou,
Un amour d'UIQ: Scénario pour un film qui manque (Editions Amsterdam/Multitudes, 2012)
and
Félix Guattari (trans. Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni),
A Love of UIQ (dist. By U. of MN Press for Univocal Publishing, 2016)
Franco (Bifo) Berardi,
Felix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Macmillan, 2008)
Femke Herregraven text describing the basis of catastrophe bonds, and profiting from climate disasters
http://femkeherregraven.net/volatilitystorms/
Ismaïl Bahri Introduces His Film "Foyer"
https://mubi.com/es/notebook/posts/ismail-bahri-introduces-his-film-foyer
Carl Hagenbeck [human zookeeper in Hamburg]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hagenbeck
Damian Zane, “Being black in Nazi Germany”, BBC News, 22 May 2019, on the work of Amma Asante
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48273570
"Traana" -- Raphaël Grisey, Kàddu Yaraax, Bouba Touré
https://raphaelgrisey.net/works/traana-temporary-migrant/
